EIGHTY-FOUR ISSUES AGO I WROTE MY FIRST EDITOR’S NOTE for this magazine. Like this issue, the November/December 2009 edition was dedicated to MFA programs, and in this space I wrote about how I had been reminded of the seasonal rhythms of student life while watching my. “You can’t ever find it. /But you can lose it.” Just as I did during that autumn fourteen years ago, I find in this magazine much to affirm my feelings and allay my fears. “I just love working with writers because of who we are: people who seek meaning, who seek to make meaning, the soulfulness of the writer,” author and editor Jamia Wilson tells Vivian Lee in this issue’s installment of Agents & Editors (68). The soulfulness of the writer shines in our cover profile by Destiny O. Birdsong (44), who describes , the extraordinary exploration of race, legacy, and community by Roger Reeves, as “a product of love, a book that was forged in communities that challenged Reeves’s thinking in the same ways he seeks to challenge ours.” In his contribution to “Should I Stay or Should I Go? Letters From Six Writer-Mentors on the Choice to Pursue an MFA” (78), Mike McClelland writes, “My hope for you is that you give yourself the time to grow and the time to find what you love in your process.” Can we really ask for much more? I am grateful to all the writers and editors involved in making this issue, for their willingness to explore the many topics related to writing, community, and publishing—in short, the life of the writer—and for their courage to articulate, as Hirshfield calls poems, “responses to questions that have no answers.” The life of this writer, and father, is richer for it.
